How Does Cloud Automation Affect Manual Testing?

The world of mobile application is vast and the
plethora of applications available for the same purpose makes the competition
really stiff. This is one of the reasons why testing is an extremely important
facet of app development. The other important considerations include revenues
from downloads, user experience, positive reviews, etc.

While testing has its set of advantages, there are
many challenges as well. When apps are deployed through various new mediums,
then the initial phases of setting up a testing environment and creating test
cases can be a real challenge. Moving your app to cloud or deploying it through
the cloud is one such situation which has become common.

This blog will discuss how cloud automation affects
the testing in whole with particular focus on manual QA testing. Let’s look at
a few effects of cloud automation on testing industry.

The Environment

When we talk about the on-premise environment for
testing, it is a controlled environment where inputs and outputs depend on what
you are doing. This in reality does not resemble the actual user environment
which is way more versatile and unpredictable. The user environment will keep
changing unlike the on-premise testing environment.

When you deploy apps through cloud, infrastructure is
generally not in your control unless you have infrastructure as a service. In
this case, it is easy to replicate user like environment which might change and
as a result manual QA testing is more appropriate because standardizing
everything might not be possible.

The Exposure

The kind of cloud you opt for like public, private, or
hybrid differ slightly from each other. Opting for an automatic testing
solution might require a lot of customization and thus investment. Automation
should be limited to testing in cases where the investment is worth and the
return is high. In cloud set-up, automation can be a high investment with
minimal return in some cases.

Manual QA testing works well in a cloud set-up because
same resources can be used to check the application that is deployed through
the cloud irrespective of it being private, public, or hybrid. The need is to
inform the resources of the test cases and equip them to test efficiently.

The Scalability

One of the core reasons for cloud’s popularity is the
scalability. You pay for the service that you want and you can easily
transition from one to another. This is a great advantage. In case of automatic
testing, the solution that you choose might not be as scalable as manual QA
testing where the number of testers can be altered as per the requirement.

Additionally, an automatic tool might work for particular
Software whereas manual QA can be trained to use a specific solution or test a
product according new or different protocols that are not common with automatic
testing tools.